Joe "Earthdog" Shields has a look at the MSI Z87 XPower motherboard, and puts it through a series of regular and extreme tests. It is always great to see LN2 results included in hardware reviews, thumbs up!

There comes a time in every overclockers life when you just want to go out and get the most expensive darn thing you can…just because… even though advice from the forums is to shy away from such a move. Today makes me count my blessings that a couple years ago Overclockers.com gave me the opportunity to write reviews. Fast forward those couple of years to today and I have in my possession the most expensive darn motherboard on the Z87 platform at this time, the MSI Z87 XPower. The features list is long and its power phases are more robust than anything I have seen. This should be a good one people. Let’s dive in and take a look!

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So after all is said and done, I have managed to beat my MPower record and validate at 6.2 GHz (hit 6.3 Ghz but personally messed up the validation by being on the wrong screen). I was able to run 3D up to 5.9 GHz as well, so overall this has been a better experience I must admit. Part of that comes from being more familiar with the platform, CPU, and BIOS and part may come from the board itself. The tell tale sign would be to move this CPU back to the MPower for additional cold testing and see what happens. Continuing on the overclocking front, the 32 phases are more than enough to take your CPU where it needs to go under extreme cooling without a doubt. The BCLK and multiplier buttons on the motherboard make for some easy breezy pushing the of clocks while in Windows for sure. The BIOS, you know I love the look, is easy enough to maneuver around and has PLENTY of options to keep even the pickiest enthusiast happy.

"It also seems his claims of inefficiency are not reflected in his own testing... look at the SPi 32M for example... the bandwidth numbers as well. All are right there in the pack! "

Sadly they are not :) Plz retest at high ram frequency mate, maybe your setup will show similar stuff as my board and latencies go off track (not Bandwidth) Secondly my board lost a lot of efficiency with 1.19 bios (though needed to use this one as I needed XMP compatibility)...

Even with the nicely improved A11 bios, I lost 2-3 sec loss against the other boards in SuperPi 32M, which is too much in my book... but opinions differ ofcourse :)

I hope MSI can quickly rectify this in upcoming biosses :) The board has good potential but a good bios update needs to unleash the true powaaaaa :woot: go go bios team !